Ultra-processed foods are causing a chronic disease epidemic

Food regulators should penalize companies selling cheap hyper-palatable products and require healthy food to be accessible.

By Jackson Bartelt

For decades, popular culture has stumbled through endless diet fads: Atkins, Keto, Paleo, intermittent fasting. Expert recommendations have scapegoated specific nutrients to limit fats, carbs, protein, fats again. Among all this confusion, shady salesmen have promoted unregulated supplements with exorbitant price tags promising to improve health and spur weight loss.

Beneath all these overblown claims, though, lies a legitimate diagnosis. There is something fundamentally broken about the way we eat. Health gurus and policymakers alike have consistently missed the mark by pointing to problematic nutrients in our food and offering miracle cures as a solution. Instead, the underlying problem is not one that any individual can ward off through self-determination. Rather, it is an industry effort to endlessly expand profit at the expense of public health. Their main weapon: ultra-processed foods.

To make real change for the future of our country’s health, public health officials and policymakers must turn a new page on their strategy to combat the rapidly expanding diet-related chronic disease epidemic. This requires a nuanced understanding of ultra-processed foods and a bold commitment to rein in unregulated profit motive within the food industry to improve public health.

The term “ultra-processed food” was originally used in 2009 by a Brazilian team of researchers. This original study became the basis for the formalized Nova classification system, intended to codify the degree of processing of various foods.

The Nova system outlines four groups of foods: unprocessed or minimally processed foods, processed culinary ingredients, processed foods, and ultra-processed foods. On one end of the spectrum are raw food ingredients or their lightly processed counterparts—think of chopped onions or cooked oats. On the other end are food products with multiple additives that have been stripped of various parts of the original crop. These foods often hardly resemble any living thing that produced them—think candy, soda, frozen pizza, or hot dogs.

Ultra-processed foods are extremely widespread with very intentional tactics used to increase their consumption. One estimate showed that nearly 70 percent of the US food supply consists of ultra-processed foods. Even within the grocery store, you may walk past seemingly endless rows of cookies, chips, soda, canned meats, and sugary cereal before ever laying eyes on a vegetable.

In fact, one study of over 86,000 grocery stores’ advertisement circulars found that over 45 percent of ads were for highly processed foods. Just consider the layout of a grocery store. Each aisle has an end-cap that is typically stocked with a blockbuster sale for that week’s highest bidding food company. These transactions between grocery stores and food companies are called “slotting fees” and it’s not hard to imagine which multinational conglomerates can pay top dollar for the precious space. In some cases, products are placed at children’s eye-level to catch children’s attention with familiar mascots and pressure parents into buying them.

Another dominant component to the over-consumption of ultra-processed foods is ease of access. One recent analysis found that a healthy food basket was anywhere from 10 percent to 60 percent more expensive than an unhealthy food basket bought at supermarkets across six countries including the U.S. Ultra-processed foods also come ready to eat and can be bought in bulk because they don’t go bad nearly as quickly as minimally processed foods like produce. The convenience factor and relative affordability of ultra-processed foods compound to produce an exceptionally attractive option for consumers.

Ten years after the Brazilian team coined the Nova terminology, a foundational paper shed light on the way ultra-processed foods may be harmful. In 2019, Dr. Kevin Hall and colleagues published the results of a randomized-controlled crossover trial in a highly controlled metabolic ward study. Participants were confined to a room for a 28-day period to gain precise measurements of food intake and energy expenditure. The study provided participants with either unlimited minimally processed food or unlimited ultra-processed food. When provided ultra-processed foods, participants consumed about 500 calories in a day more than when provided minimally processed food. On average, they gained about a kilogram during the 2-week period eating ultra-processed foods and lost about a kilogram during the 2-week period eating minimally processed foods. In other words, ultra-processed foods led to significantly more energy consumption and weight gain.

A recent randomized crossover trial published in Nature in August 2025 led by Dr. Sam Dicken at University College London, added important context to Dr. Kevin Hall’s previous work. They found that an ultra-processed food diet in a real-world setting, when modified to fit within the UK’s dietary guidelines, led to weight loss. However, the ultra-processed diet spurred much less weight loss than the minimally-processed diet. Further, it was unclear if the weight lost by the ultra-processed diet was from fat or lean tissue.

“We know that most people’s diets are generally quite poor in terms of the amount of nutrients they consume,” Dickens said. “Too high in saturated fat, too high in sugar, too high in salt and not enough fibre.” But because the ultra-processed foods in the trial were modified to fit within the UK’s guidelines, they still exhibited relatively beneficial effects compared to participants’ very unhealthy diets before starting the study.

“Not all ultra-processed foods are equal, so we shouldn’t be thinking of ultra-processed foods as being bad, but [instead] an effect of ultra-processing,” Dicken notes, adding that “it’s not just the physical extent to which these foods have been broken down—more the purpose of processing.” In fact, all foods are processed to some degree. Even raw fruits are picked, packaged, peeled, trimmed, and mechanically prepared for digestion by chewing. In some cases,ultra-processing can be necessary—such as baby formula for infants without a parent who can lactate.

Dr. Dicken explains that ultra-processed foods arose from the post-WWII population boom to meet nutritional and caloric needs, but over time the purpose of processing shifted to competing with other companies to create the most tasty, palatable, and profitable food possible. He says that, to do this, companies began “removing some of the beneficial ingredients, refining them, adding cheap ingredients in, making them super accessible, heavily marketed, and much easier to consume more than we want to.”

Therefore, ultra-processing becomes a useful stand-in for the broader pattern these foods share: high sodium, high saturated fat, low fiber, low protein, hyperpalatable taste and texture, predatory advertising, and high energy density. Centering ultra-processing uniquely forces us to consider who does the processing and why.

Food engineers craft them to hit the bliss point—a perfect combination of salt, sugar, and fat that override fullness signals and tell our brains to eat more. Like opening a bag of Cheetos, you’re almost certain to keep eating until the bag is empty or you exert monumental self-control. Similarly, food engineers perform consumer tests on different textures of the same product to achieve the optimal mouthfeel like crunchiness or smoothness.

Dr. Dicken’s trial shows that ultra-processed foods within dietary guidelines for nutrients like fiber did lead to weight loss, albeit less than minimally processed foods. However, it’s unlikely that food companies would make these changes, especially voluntarily, because the responsibility of corporations in a free market is not to promote public health, but to maximize profit.

When urged to make Make America Healthy Again style voluntary reformulations, the result isn’t impactful change, but high-fructose corn syrup being swapped for cane sugar in soda and synthetic dyes being replaced for natural dyes, both of which are likely to do less than nothing to combat chronic disease; instead they may exacerbate the problem by making consumers think they’re now safe to eat as much as they want. Real change requires staunch government regulation in the food industry—but this approach cuts into profits.

For too long, the responsibility of combating the chronic diet-related disease epidemic has fallen on the individual. Sarah Flood, a registered dietitian who works with students at Emory University, notes that there are many things consumers can do to be diligent around ultra-processed foods. These include choosing foods with a shorter ingredient label, choosing the lesser processed of two options if no whole-food version exists, or even aiming to purchase foods without an ingredient label at all.

“Being a dietitian who works with a lot of folks with disordered eating, I see the outcome of eating in a restrictive way, and it really exacerbates that mental health side of things,” says Flood. “I’d like the more additive mindset instead of subtractive. And usually if you can fill up on good things, your desire for those ultra-palatable foods tends to quiet.”

Despite what individual consumers can do, food choice tends to be more strongly influenced by systemic variables like cost, convenience, lack of healthy alternatives, and the intentionally hyperpalatable nature of ultra-processed foods. Flood says “even just having access to more healthful foods is number one. A lot of people tend to have a reasonably good understanding, like fruits and veggies are really good for your health, so [accessibility] would be my number one priority,” while advocating for consumer education and careful government regulation to complement increased availability.

One thing is certain, though. No longer can the responsibility of tackling chronic diet-related disease fall on the individual, left powerless to corporate shaping of the food environment and overwhelmed by pseudoscientific alternatives. The effect of ultra-processing is too great to ignore in public policy. Therefore, policymakers must shift attention to diligently increasing regulation of these foods. Various approaches have been suggested and tried including Mexico’s warning label system, taxation on sugar-sweetened beverages, or financial incentives to increase fresh, whole food consumption. No matter the strategy, corporate profiteering at the expense of public health through ultra-processing must be stopped.